A US woman who shot and killed her husband and two adult children before taking her own life is thought to have committed the shocking crime as a result of being ostracised from the religion she was raised in.

A federal judge sentenced a former Arkansas judge Wednesday to five years in prison — a stiffer punishment than prosecutors recommended — after he admitted giving young male defendants lighter sentences in return for personal benefits that included sexual favours.

Every time I tell a mate I’m doing a story on cryptocurrency, they invariably ask me the same two questions: should they invest their own hard-earned money, and which cryptocurrency will get them a Lamborghini/yacht/island quickest?

In a 60 Minutes online exclusive, reporter Liz Hayes quizzed Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on his relationship with the unpredictable Twitter aficionado and US president Donald Trump ahead of their meeting at the White House Friday.

Calls to return to accord principles

Thirty years after an accord between the Labor party and unions laid a platform to make Australia fair, compassionate and productive, there are calls to commit to its principles again.

Two weeks before the 1983 election, unions agreed to ease wage demands if the government committed to cushion inflation in the Accord on Prices and Incomes.

Former prime minister Bob Hawke says it was an essential move to prevent Australia becoming the "poor white trash of Asia", and key to his government's success in pushing through necessary economic reforms.

The former ACTU president recalled being extremely unhappy over the state of the economy in the early 1980s and hungry to make Australian industry competitive again.

Then-Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew had predicted that if Australia continued on its track, it would become "the poor white trash of Asia".

"I was terribly afraid that that analysis was accurate," Mr Hawke told a symposium at Sydney's Macquarie University on Friday.

"The accord was absolutely essential in enabling us to do things that had to be done, in my judgment, to make that forecast of Lee Kuan Yew not come true."

Ms Kearney also told the forum she didn't think the Accord would have lasted in the current media environment, because today's media were "overtly hostile to workers' interests" and to the Labor Party.